John Boehner's Career Sank Last Night

There was one thing that I regret not hitting as hard as I should have hit it during the presidential campaign recently concluded. And when I say I didn't hit it hard enough, I mean I didn't hit it like I was swinging Mjollnir at a bass drum the size of Lake Huron. The point was a simple one. There is no possible definition by which the Republicans can be considered an actual political party any more. They can be defined as a loose universe of inchoate hatreds, or a sprawling confederation of collected resentments, or an unwieldy conglomeration of self-negating orthodoxies, or an atonal choir of rabid complaint, or a cargo cult of quasi-religious politics and quasi-political religion, or simply the deafening abandoned YAWP of our bitter national Id. But they are not a political party because they have rendered themselves incapable of politics.

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What happened to John Boehner last night, when the feral children put Boehner's balls inside a Christmas pinata and invited themselves to take a whack, couldn't have happened to a nicer fellow. Boehner himself chose to be king of the dipwads. He offered himself up as Speaker knowing full well that, in 2010, the country had elected itself a Congress straight out of the more fantastical chapters of Gulliver's Travels. He had to have watched what happened thereafter, when the president put a deal on the table in 2011 that made him look like Dwight Eisenhower on a bad day, and Boehner couldn't sell it to the vandals in his caucus. He had to have watched as a vulnerable Democratic president got re-elected with ease, and brought a more liberal Democratic senatorial majority along with him, largely because the Republican presidential primary field was such a carnival of the politically insane that it even made an useless windsock like Willard Romney look like the wildest hair across Barry Goldwater's ass. Boehner had to know that there is no deal he could have brought back to his caucus — no bargain, grand or otherwise, that he could sell — because he no longer even is the putative leader of an actual political party. He is Speaker because somebody has to be, and he may not be Speaker for long, because it doesn't matter who is.

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You could see it coming during the campaign. Movement conservative politics — without which, the Republicans are the Whigs — is now made up of a series of independent power bases. That's how hopeless cases like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were able to stay "viable" for as long as they did, even though everyone in the country knew that their campaigns were at best glorified exercises in pumping up book sales and honoraria. There was no party structure in place to tell those people that it was time to fold the tents. There is no party structure to weed out the crazoids from their safely gerrymandered districts. They all are independently financed actors responding to private constituencies that are rich enough and strong enough within the party to withstand any attempt at discipline. It's a little unrealistic to expect John Boehner to wrangle them once they get to Congress.

Last night, he couldn't get the votes to pass a truly horrid plutocrat's wet dream. He couldn't get the votes to gut Obamacare or Wall Street reform. He couldn't get the votes to throw children off food stamps and he couldn't get the votes to throw the elderly off meals-on-wheels. He couldn't get the votes for a simple, vicious stunt. He couldn't get the votes because he couldn't budge enough Republicans to support a tax increase in the upper .01 percent of taxpayers. He couldn't do it because he had nothing with which to threaten people who look on governing the country as though they are running an evening-drive talk-radio program in Bugtussle. He couldn't do it because he is a Republican pretending to be a fanatic who went hat in hand to a bunch of fanatics pretending to be Republicans.

To hell with it. Over the cliff. It's a terrible idea, but it's also the only damned thing that makes sense now. (And can I mention right here how alarming it was last night to see Democrats like Elijah Cummings and John Garamendi and the absolutely hopeless Steny Hoyer pleading with Boehner to accept that Social-Security-gutting dog's breakfast of a "compromise" that the president put on the table the other day before Boehner's caucus lost its tiny mind again? That's the new compromise? That's the new "middle ground" on which "we" can come together? Are they trying to make me nostalgic for the domestic agenda of R. Milhous Nixon?) There is no deal the president can offer that Boehner can sell. If he stays, he's impotent. If he goes, he will be replaced by someone infinitely worse. Boehner at least makes a pretense of wanting to help govern the country. That will not be the case for whoever it is that comes out of the primeval political ooze into which Boehner's career sank last night. It will be somebody whose primary loyalty — and therefore, whose primary duty — will be to a loose universe of inchoate hatreds, or a sprawling confederation of collected resentments, or an unwieldy conglomeration of self-negating orthodoxies, or an atonal choir of rabid complaint, or a cargo cult of quasi-religious politics and quasi-political religion, or simply the deafening abandoned YAWP of our bitter national Id. All of these will command power among conservatives. Many of them will be lavishly financed, and all of them will be entirely sufficient unto themselves, beyond anyone's ability to command or control. This is empowered incoherence, and, at this point. we are all in its hands, if we choose to be. We should choose not to be.